I am too young to remember Dukakis, but Hillary was a terrible candidate and a perfect example of how out of touch the DNC has become. Worse than having no charisma she had negative charisma and a "I know better than you" entitled attitude. And I say that as someone who had voted GOP downballot until 2016 who voted for her and hated it. Trump, MAGA, and his friendliness with Russia even back then really felt off to me. I trusted him even less than Clinton and that's saying a lot. Very nearly sat that one out, but I'd voted in every presidential election since I turned 18 and I didn't want to not vote and regret it more.
I hope - I truly hope - that there's still some part of the GOP that isn't MAGA but I haven't been able to vote red since 2016. Way too many candidates campaign on Trump's coattails and that morally goes against what I believe in.
Interesting comment. I’m getting on in years and I can personally remember a lot of presidential candidates over the years, and I would say that the #1 ‘I know better than you’ example is Donald J Trump. I agree that Hillary Clinton was very much unliked, or untrusted maybe, but I think it was for other reasons.
Oh, absolutely, I'd agree now. Everything is "I know the most" "I have the best" etc. with him. Anything negative is fake, failing, or rigged. But in 2016 - while he already had that attitude - Clinton was disconnected from the voters and acted rather smug about it. The impression I got was that she thought she had the election in the bag and the actual election was but a formality. I think her and her team vastly underestimated Trump but also underestimated how unlikeable she was to a large portion of the country. Granted, Dems will point to a 30 year long smear campaign against her but she didn't do herself any favors.
This election the economic issues absolutely walloped Dems as so many people are struggling to make ends meet while Dems were trumpeting Bidenomics and how strong the country had recovered and the stock market. It was a disconnected message from what lower/middle class are actually dealing with and Trump was able to capitalize on that. I still think he's a bad candidate and that Harris was dealt a pretty awful hand, but I wish she had done more to distance and distinguish herself from Biden and to address the economic issues affecting Americans that are not rich.
On a more personal note, Trump was appealing to voters like myself. It's been hard to get groceries for my family the last couple of years. Often we've budgeted down to under $10 in checking, nothing in savings, and coasted into the next paycheck with the gas light on in the car and praying nothing came up. We've had to tactically pay bills based on who will get upset if it's a few days late. Despite meeting net and gross income limits for SNAP we were declined. And I can see how easy it would be to blame Biden, or to blame Harris for how hard it has been. But I also understand how Covid affected the supply chain, the greed of some companies taking advantage of that to jack up prices, and that our struggles echo what a lot of the world has had to go through. Trump's promises about making it better are empty air.
Totally agree. I was just in the AskEconomist sub and an ‘expert’ was trying to explain to me that while the cumulative total CPI went up 22% during the pandemic, average cumulative wage increases were 27%
The post might as well have been written by the Harris/Biden campaign! Seriously. So out of touch.
We saw that kind of rhetoric non-stop in r/neoliberal for the past two years. Some of us kept trying to get the yuppies in that subreddit to understand that working class people are having a hard time (a difficult concept for the upwardly-mobile yuppies in r/neoliberal and the DNC to relate to).
Obviously Trump is NOT the solution, but it’s easy to see how he hoodwinked desperate people into believing he is. The Democrats and the media should have taken this into account, but they clearly just assumed that they could simply coast to victory on a message of “but Wall Street is doing great!” and “your grocery bills aren’t high! That’s just ‘vibes’!” 🙄🤦♂️
-8
u/bearcatjoe Right Visitor Nov 16 '24 edited Nov 16 '24
Among the worst major party candidates in my lifetime. I think Hillary or Dukakis are a distant #2 & #3?